Fleet Defense Fighters in The United States Navy
In the 1950s, the United States Navy led an unsuccessful F6D Missileer project. Later it launched the development of a large F-111B fleet air defense fighter, but this project was cancelled too. Finally, the role was assigned to the F-14 Tomcat, carrying AIM-54 Phoenix missiles. This aircraft was well-capable of fighter-to-fighter combat, as well as air interdiction missions, so it does not exactly fit the "pure" interceptor niche. Both the fighter and the missile were retired in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Interceptor Aircraft
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“On the middle of that quiet floor
sits a fleet of small black ships,
square-rigged, sails furled, motionless,
their spars like burned matchsticks.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Larry Holmes (b. 1949)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—”indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“My only rival, the United States cavalry.”
—James Kevin McGuinness, and John Ford. Mrs. Yorke (Maureen O’Hara)
“I call to mind the navy great
That the Greeks brought to Troye town,
And how the boistous winds did beat
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Till Agamemnon’s daughter’s blood
Appeased the gods that them withstood.”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)